Shahu Patole. 2024. Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada. Anna He Apoorna Brahma. Translated by Bhushan Korgaonkar. Gurugram, Haryana: Harper Collins India, Paperback, 386 pages, ISBN-13: 978-9356295834
Reviewed by Krishnendu Ray (New York University)
Editor’s Note: This in-depth review essay, which reflexively considers the relationship of cooking and caste in India, will be published in parts over the next 3 weeks.
Shahu Patole’s The Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada: Anna He Apoorna Brahma (2024) is arguably the most important cookbook to come out of South Asia. That is for several reasons. It represents a gastronomy of the oppressed that has been silenced precisely on the grounds of its provisioning, cooking and eating practices. If Dalits were a country, they would be counted among one of the most populated nations in the world.
I have a collection of more than a hundred cookbooks, and have leafed through dozen others, but I have never done so with a Dalit cookbook. In more than two decades of work with food and everyday cooking I have never worked with a Mahar text. So, for me, it is the most exciting thing to run my fingers over the rough texture of this book, prop it up in my kitchen, and work on its subtle material and socio-cultural iterations. It represents one of the more important events in the history of cookbook publishing, in part because it violates almost every rule, we (South Asian elites) have normalized about Indian cooking at home and abroad.
This review essay is broken up into three parts: the first position’s me as a caste Hindu reviewer of a Dalit cookbook; the second outlines a historiography of caste as a changing classificatory system experienced phenomenologically in some relationship to class and race; and the final section delves into the specificity of the book at hand.
My Caste
Dalit scholars argue that caste Hindus may consider themselves caste-less yet they benefit from the caste system. The invisibility of their caste is a privilege, just as being unaware of race is an entitlement only a few can afford. So, let me frame my caste experience before I discuss Dalit cooking, which is represented in this cookbook as a particular kind of relationship between work, care, social geography, and discrimination.
I have been told that my gotra name Ghose locates me among the Shudras, which is lower caste. But we have been an upwardly mobile group over the last few centuries. This cluster of jatis has climbed the class, hence caste, hierarchy with the Nawabs of Bengal as Kayasthas (scribes). They derive their lineage from migrants from the middle-Gangetic valley in present day Uttar Pradesh. Those were some of the earliest groups to learn Persian to be hired as record keepers for rulers and administrators. That was followed by a similar anglophone strategy under the British, to score professions of writing, so necessary for a modern bureaucratic administration. They graduated over time to become tax-collectors and landowners. Although caste, jati, gotra and varna are not exactly congruent systems of classifying people, I am underplaying their difference here to underline their convergence.[1] Some of the Kayasthas became zamindars. A Persian term for landowners, the British incorporated zamindars into their governance structure as revenue collectors. From that we acquired the non-caste title of Ray Mahashaya (some branches of the family claim the title of Khans), which was shortened by my great-great-grandfather to Ray, letting go of the grandiose Mahashaya, once he lost his zamindari under land reform legislation in independent India. That is the name with which my paternal grandfather Madhusudhan migrated to Balasore, Odisha from Midnapore, under the tutelage of another branch of the Rays, to become a small town second-grade criminal lawyer (mukhtar).
Madhusudhan was brought up by his mother after the early demise of his father, the story goes, by making and selling artisanal puffed rice, among other things. So, there was some downward economic mobility that was staunched with his marriage into the family of my better-off grandmother. It was his 9th grade education that led to his career in law. He made a good living for a large family of thirteen children from the 1930s but was reduced to penury in the last decade of his life from 1955 to 1965, when he died penniless in his early sixties.
As a caste group we are exemplars of what the sociologist M.N.Srinivas (1965) called the process of Sanskritization that allowed my ancestors to acquire power, profession, wealth and prestige, along with prejudice. Persianization and anglophonity played similar roles to Sanskrit in consecrating the social location of our jati cluster in the modern period.
Parts of India my ancestors come from, that is Bengal and Odisha, were mostly populated by Brahmin and Muslim elites, Shudra peasantry and occupations, Muslim cultivators and fisherfolk, outcaste and tribal groups, with non-existent intermediate caste categories from the Kshatriya and Vaishya varnas.[2]
For those at the bottom of the hierarchy caste operates as a barrier, it prevents access to water, streets and resources for livelihood, education, employment and marriage. For the more dominant groups, caste operates as an opportunity, affording networks, pathways and privilege (Jodhka, 2016; Mosse, 2018; Vaid, 2014). Importantly, caste shapes interactions between different groups, governing who one can eat with, accept food from, marry, and how to relate to casted others. While some scholars suggest that the significance of caste is declining (Béteille, 2012; Kapur et al., 2010), others suggest that the picture is more complex and contested (Bhoi and Gorringe 2023, p. 3).
Most of the sociological studies on caste are about rules of commensality, so food and marriage are central to modes of defining it. My father and mother (the latter from the jat of Giris) married outside of considerations of caste. Technically that makes me an outcaste, but who is going to police that (given my residence far from home and access to other forms of capital). To marry against caste rules, they had to elope 300 kilometers to the big city of Calcutta in the early 1960s, from where they returned to be grudgingly accepted by their families.
The ideology of the Odia Giris is analogous to the story of the Bengali Kayasthas. In their narration they count their lineage back to Rajput and Maratha settlers along the banks of the Subarnarekha River, who were the enforcers for the Peshwa rulers. They called themselves Raju, which has sometimes been classified among Other Backward Castes. In matters of caste and jati there is constant self-fashioning and other sniping. Elements of the Rays consider the Giris to be inferior in social hierarchy either due to their linguistic capital (Bengali versus Odia) or caste prejudice.
Having broken the rules, my parents never taught my brother and me about caste. Some of the caste pride among the Rays of the earlier generation had already weakened with the loss of zamindari. Economic reform and redistributive politics do have desired cultural consequences. We had two uncles who continued to have grandiose dreams of Ray Mahashaya but were considered odd by the rest. By then room had opened in Gandhian and Nehruvian modern India to disavow caste as a part of a nationalist ideology. I had to learn about caste from the previous generation – mainly from my paternal grandmother – and discussions with my family, especially my brother, an aunt, and a younger uncle, who are better informed of the narrative histories of the lineage.
Who is Dalit
Given that personal history, framed within the limits of a hierarchical but Sanskritizing world we aspired to live in, I knew little about the specificities of Dalit foods, until my exposure to Patole’s Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada (2024). It is one among a recent slew of writing (Rege et. al. 2009, Guru 2009, Masoodi 2016, Kumar 2020) and stories on YouTube and Instagram channels (SMCSChannel 2015), that has opened the discussion on subaltern Indian cuisines.[3] New platforms where old forms of gatekeeping have collapsed, and new self-assertive classes of the dominated, have provided this important opening into Indian cooking.
Dalit is a relatively recent term of political autonomy asserted by former untouchables and outcastes (Valmiki 2003: 84, Mukherjee 2003: xviii). It is a form of self-classification, such as African American in the US context, for what was defined in various languages by the upper castes as Achut, Avarnas, Pariahs, etc. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi invented the term harijan – god’s people – as a part of the nationalist mobilization against the British and to stem Dalit separation into a separate category from the Hindus. With the adoption of the Indian constitution on 26th January 1950, untouchability was abolished, but it continued to be practiced by the upper castes with varying degrees of efficacy and intensity, analogous to the use of race after the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. Gandhi’s endearing term Harijan was considered patronizing by those who identify as Dalit. The root of Dalit is from dal, which is to grind down, also referencing the various legumes in Indian cuisines, a metaphor and a metonym for oppression. In the wake of Babasaheb Ambedkar’s re-classification, one of the earlier usages of Dalit was at a 1958 conference on literature organized in Bombay (Mukherjee 2003: xviii). In 1972 a group of Marathi writers formed the Dalit Panthers, inspired by the Black Panthers. The state of Maharashtra has been an important center of Dalit self-assertion, analogous to the equally powerful association of anti-Brahmin Dravidian identity among Tamils. In contrast, Bengal and Odisha have not witnessed such idioms of self-assertion of the oppressed.[4]
There is a long history of cross-fertilization between African American movements for civil rights and the Dalit movement in India. That goes back to B. R. Ambedkar’s (1891-1956) Ph.D. at Columbia University, and his interest both in the U.S. Constitution, especially the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified in 1868), and Dewey’s Pragmatism (Mukherjee 2003: xviii; Stroud 2023). That distance from vernacular Indian life and language allowed him the room to develop a critique. After his Ph.D., Ambedkar returned to India to become the minister of law and penned a draft of the Constitution in 1949, which outlined affirmative action in government jobs and higher education, for people who came to be reclassified as the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST). Those contractions, SC and ST and reservations based on that classification, continue to be the currency of political activity in India. Affirmative action in India preceded the US case, where it was implemented first with Executive orders under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
So far, I have positioned myself while making two arguments. I belong to a group of upwardly mobile lower castes. That upward mobility, by class and ritual status, is often made invisible because of static notions of caste, and over-emphasis on middle-classness in most modern Indian cookbooks. Which is why I have gone on for a bit about my family, that allows me to illustrate the dynamic socio-economic fate of caste in modern India. As Surinder Jodhka notes (2023: 333) “castes are collective identities, but the collective is experienced very differently by individuals from different caste groups. To those located in positions of domination, the higher-ups, are often unaware of the fact that their ‘everyday’ is also shaped and inured by the privileges that they inherit because of the habitus of their caste group. Its apparent absence in many contexts could be proof of its overarching presence. Spaces of privilege often self-identify as sites of ‘merit’, devoid of any social identity.” So, my habitus which as Pierre Bourdieu says blinds us to our location in a hierarchy, must be pegged to make sense of Dalit ways of cooking, feeding and eating. In the next two sections I discuss the anthropology of caste and then the specificity of the cookbook under discussion.
References:
BBC News. 2024, Aug 2. “The Dalit Kitchen – Documenting the culinary history of a marginalised community,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcJ9_or9UBE
Béteille, Andre. 2012. “The Peculiar Tenacity of Caste.” Economic and Political Weekly, 47(13), 41–48 https://www.epw.in/journal/2012/13/special-articles/peculiar-tenacity-caste.html
Bhoi, Dhaneswar and Hugo Gorringe. 2023. “Introduction,” Caste in Everyday Life: Experience and Affect in Indian Society. Springer International Publishing AG, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-30655-6
Chandra, Uday, Geir Heierstad, and Kenneth Bo Nielsen. Eds. 2016. The Politics of Caste in West Bengal. New Delhi: Routledge, https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-of-Caste-in-West-Bengal/Chandra-Heierstad-Nielsen/p/book/9780815376606?srsltid=AfmBOopteq6-INyg54Xnnm-IGc26r3guHrX-G8q40LaZ7gqq43YaoWL3
Guru, Gopal. 2009. Food as a Metaphor for Cultural Hierarchies. Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/research/Food%2Bas%2Ba%2BMetaphor%2Bfor%2BCultural%2BHierarchies%2B-%2BGopal%2BGuru%2B%28working%2Bpaper%29.pdf
Jodhka, Surinder Singh. 2016. “Ascriptive Hierarchies: Caste and Its Reproduction in Contemporary India.” Current Sociology, 64(2), 228–243, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0011392115614784
Jodhka, Surinder Singh and James Manor. 2018. “Introduction,” in S. Jodhka & J. Manor (Eds.), Contested Hierarchies, Persisting Influence: Caste and Power in Twenty-First Century India (pp. 1–36). New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, https://orientblackswan.com/details?id=9789386689603
Jodkha, Surinder Singh. 2023. “Afterword.” In Dhaneswar Bhoi and Hugo Gorringe, eds., Caste in Everyday Life: Experience and Affect in Indian Society. Springer International Publishing AG, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-30655-6
Kapur, Devesh, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Lant Pritchett, and D. Shyam Babu. 2010. “Rethinking Inequality: Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Market Reform Era,” Economic and Political Weekly, 45(35), 39–49, https://www.epw.in/journal/2010/35/special-articles/rethinking-inequality-dalits-uttar-pradesh-market-reform-era.html
Kumar, Vinay. 2020. “Blood Fry & Other Dalit Recipes from My Childhood,” Goya India https://www.goya.in/blog/blood-fry-other-recipes-from-my-dalit-childhood
Masoodi, Ashwaq. 2016, Sept 16. “A Story of Culinary Apartheid,” Mint https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/wJzDhGEE4csaX2BjhjHMsL/A-story-of-culinary-apartheid.html
Mosse, David. 2018. “Caste and Development: Contemporary Perspectives on a Structure of Discrimination and Advantage,” World Development, 1(10), 422–436, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X18301943
Mukherjee, Arun Prabha. 2003. “Introduction,” in Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki, New York: Columbia University Press, https://cup.columbia.edu/book/joothan/9780231129725
Rege, Sharmila, Sangita Thosar, Deepa Balkisan Tak and Tina Aranha. 2009. Isn’t this plate Indian? Dalit Histories and Memories of Food. Pune: University of Pune Press.
SMCSChannel. 2015. Caste on the Menu Card. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQYRinzRGXU
Srinivas, M.N. 1965. Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India. Bombay. Asia Publishing.
Stroud, Scott R. 2023. The Evolution of Pragmatism in India. Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo186009677.html
Vaid, Divya. 2014. “Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence,” Annual Review of Sociology, 40(1), 391–410, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2475573
Valmiki, Omprakash. 2003. Joothan. An Untouchable’s Life. New York: Columbia University Press, https://cup.columbia.edu/book/joothan/9780231129725
[1] To complicate things even further, “While the Brahminic idea of varna hierarchy did originate in the ancient past, it did not go without contestation. A wide variety of shramanic traditions flourished too. In many instances, they too subscribed to certain forms of hierarchy” (Jodhka 2023: 334).
[2] Just to take the observations of a commentator on one region of Bengal, one could have lower castes such as Rajbanshi, Namshudra, Bagdi, and Paindra and Muslim cultivators would be classified along caste lines such as Syeds, Sheikhs, Mughals, and Pathans. I am keeping that social complexity outside the frame of this analysis here to get around too much clutter for an outsider non-South Asian audience.
[3] Dr. Vandana Swami, Professor at Easwari School of Liberal Arts (ESLA), Department of Sociology and Anthropology, provided a comprehensive list of writings and audiovisual material for my perusal. Thanks to Dr. Ishita Dey for productive comments on an earlier version of this essay and detailed references. I have incorporated both their suggestions into this version. I am greatly obligated to their help in developing a thorough review of the literature and platforms.
[4] In Bengal the puzzle remains “how a tiny majority of upper castes (about 10 per cent in the early twentieth century) were able to exercise a remarkable hegemonic hold over the rest of the population. There have been no bahujan political parties in West Bengal, as in north India, nor has there been an anti-Brahmin movement, as in south India” (Banerjee in Chandra, Heierstad and Nielsen 2016: xiv)